Taking his on-screen mauling on the chin, the mayor said that his inquisitor did "a splendid job. There is no doubt that is what the BBC is for – holding us to account" and added that he had been expecting to talk about more recent political events rather than the controversies of his pre-mayoral and pre-political career.

"I fully concede it wasn't my most blistering performance, but that was basically because I was set to talk about the Olympics and housing in London and he wanted to talk about other things, some of them – my private life and so on – of quite some antiquity, the details of which I wasn't brilliant on," Johnson said.

The mayor was unexpectedly dragged back by Mair to three events – the first of which were the events that led up to his sacking from the Times in 1988 – responding with a mixture of misunderstanding and benign haplessness.

Mair had said his sacking by the Times came from having "made up a quote", Johnson said he had just "mildly sandpapered something someone said", in this case making up two sets of quotes made by the historian Colin Lucas, who also happens to be Johnson's godfather.

Meanwhile, in a 1990 telephone call, a recording of which was made public five years later, Johnson agreed to pass details of a News of the World journalist to his Eton and Oxford contemporary, Darius Guppy, who felt the reporter had targeted his family. Guppy first reassured his friend the journalist would not be badly hurt and would only get "a cracked rib or something". In Sunday's BBC interview, Johnson argued he was merely humouring an irate friend.

Finally, Johnson was challenged on his dismissal as shadow arts minister in 2004 by the then-Tory leader, Michael Howard, for misleading him over an affair with Petronella Wyatt, a columnist at the Spectator, which Johnson edited at the time. Johnson insisted he had never spoken about the affair with Howard.

This defence was "semantic", said Sonia Purnell, author of the biography Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, given that Johnson discussed the matter with Howard's press secretary, Guy Black. Overall, Purnell said, the incidents cited by Mair displayed "a pattern of individualistic behaviour and a casual relationship with the truth".

Such questions were completely valid, she argued: "He's light on policy. We know so little about what he believes in, if anything. When he was once asked, do you have any convictions, he quipped back, 'Yes, one, for speeding, a long time ago.' We don't know anything about what a Johnsonian government would be like, so all we have to go on is his personality and character. Even more than for most politicians it's crucial to know about this."

Nevertheless, his father did leap to his defence. An enraged Stanley said: "I thought Eddie Mair's interview was about the most disgusting piece of journalism I've listened to for a very long time," he told London's LBC radio. "The BBC sank about as low as it could. If grilling people about their private lives, accusing them of guilt by association and openly abusing them is a legitimate interview, then frankly, I don't know where we are coming."

Overall, Mair had asked Johnson, was he a "nasty piece of work"? but Johnson brushed off the remarks on Monday. The mayor said: "He was perfectly within his rights to have a bash at me. In fact it would have been shocking if he hadn't. If a BBC presenter can't attack a nasty Tory politician what's the world coming to?"

The BBC said it had received almost 400 complaints about the interview, which it defended as attempts to "elicit responses to direct questions that were not being answered."

Boris's blunders

•The made-up quotes As a 23-year-old Times trainee Johnson wrote a May 1988 article about archaeologists' discovery of Edward II's 14th-century palace. He quoted an Oxford historian, Colin Lucas, giving the colourful detail that the monarch "enjoyed a reign of dissolution with his catamite, Piers Gaveston" at the palace. Gaveston was indeed a nobleman of the time and rumoured to have been the king's lover. He was also beheaded in 1312, a dozen years before the palace was built.

Lucas worried for his academic reputation and told the Times he did not say this. Trying to repair the matter but instead making it worse, Johnson wrote a follow-up which included another quote from Lucas, also denied by the academic. Johnson was sacked by the Times editor at the time, Charles Wilson.

•The phone call In a brief conversation described by Johnson's biographer, Sonia Purnell, as "ludicrous but chilling", Johnson seemingly agrees to a demand by a friend, Darius Guppy, to pass on details about a reporter so Guppy can arrange for the man to be beaten up. Johnson now dismisses this as humouring an old friend, but Purnell says this doesn't seem credible: "He wasn't some kid in the sixth form being an idiot. He was a married man with a very responsible job."

While Johnson went on to politics and celebrity, his friend Guppy was jailed for trying to defraud Lloyd's by claiming for a faked jewel robbery, and now lives in South Africa.

•The denied affair Johnson initially and famously characterised reports he had cheated on his wife with Spectator colleague Petronella Wyatt as "an inverted pyramid of piffle". Such a colourful denial made his discomfort all the greater when the affair was confirmed by, among others, Wyatt's mother, with friends of Wyatt briefing newspapers that she had had two abortions and felt betrayed by the then-Tory arts spokesman.

Johnson's dismissal from the front bench happened after the party leader, Michael Howard, felt he had been misled. Even then there was some wriggling over precisely what this entailed, with Johnson allies insisting neither Howard nor his press secretary, Guy Black, has actually pressed the MP on the matter.